Religion and Violence

by Vries, Hent De; De Vries, Hent

• ISBN13: 9780801867675
• ISBN10: 0801867673
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-11-06
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

Does violence inevitably shadow our ethico-political engagements and decisions, including our understandings of identity, whether collective or individual? Questions that touch upon ethics and politics can greatly benefit from being rephrased in terms borrowed from the arsenal of religious and theological figures, because the association of such figures with a certain violence keeps moralism, whether in the form of fideism or humanism, at bay. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida's careful posing of such questions and rearticulations pioneers new modalities for systematic engagement with religion and philosophy alike.

Author Biography

Hent de Vries is professor of Modern European Thought in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University and professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Among his books are Philosophy and the Turn to Religion and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, both available from Johns Hopkins. He is the co-editor, with Samuel Weber, of Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination and Religion and Media, and, with Mieke Bal, of the book series Cultural Memory in the Present.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xxi
Introduction: Horror Religiosus	p. 1
State, Academy, Gensorship: The Question of Religious Tolerance	p. 18
The Institution of Philosophy	p. 19
Modernity and the Question of Religious Tolerance: Rereading Kant's Conflict of the Faculties	p. 25
The Triple Sign: Signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon	p. 49
The Voice from Nowhere: Philosophy and the Paradoxical Topography of the University	p. 57
Paganism, Religion Proper, and the Politics of Theology: Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason	p. 67
Multiculturalism Reconsidered	p. 87
Concentricity and Monocentrism	p. 100
Ineradicable Evil	p. 102
The Academic Contract: Old and New	p. 110
Violence and Testimony: Kierkegaardian Meditations	p. 123
Rereading Fear and Trembling	p. 139
The Modality of Persecuted Truth	p. 142
The "Possibility of the Offense": Kierkegaard on Martyrdom	p. 160
Tautology and Heterology: Tout autre est tout autre	p. 175
A dieu, adieu, a-dieu	p. 178
Doubling "God" and God's Double	p. 187
Beyond Sacrifice	p. 200
Anti-Babel: The Theologico-Political at Cross Purposes	p. 211
Positive Theology	p. 213
Political Theology Revisited	p. 215
Of Miracles: Kant's Political Theology	p. 223
"Les extremes se touchent"	p. 236
Rereading Walter Benjamin	p. 251
The Originary Affirmation of Mysticism	p. 256
"In the Beginning--No Beginning": The Originary Catastrophe and the Gift of Language	p. 266
"In the Beginning There Will Have Been Force": The Mystical Postulate, Justice, and the Law	p. 275
A Dieu: The Divine Signature	p. 287
Hospitable Thought: Before and beyond Cosmopolitanism	p. 293
Turning Around Religion: The Conditions of Responsibility	p. 296
Two Concepts of Hospitality	p. 300
Hospitality as "Culture Itself"	p. 307
The Torah before and beyond Revelation	p. 325
Complementary Alternatives	p. 335
Hospitality qua Friendship	p. 349
The Theologico-Political Once More: Absolute Hostility	p. 353
The Christianization of the Political	p. 362
A Black Swan: Friendship from a Metaphysical and a Pragmatic Point of View	p. 370
Final Considerations: Cosmopolitanism and the Institution of Philosophy	p. 388
Bibliography	p. 399
Index	p. 433
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